18 November 2009

Related to an article with the usual panicking about Google Street View.

Protip for complainers: build a fucking fence if you don’t want your genital warts photographed when you walk naked in your suburban garden.

Yes, Google and the likes are really privacy issues in the scale of spanish galeons on monster truck wheels.

High resolution, freely available street maps with metadata are, however, some of the most useful types of services ever, and someone building this doesn’t even enter into the “ethically dubious” category.

Shut up and start looking at the real issues, such as real time video surveillance and online data mining.

20 September 2008

“…curious Germans have flocked [in Bodman-Ludwigshafen, in the far south of Germany] for over a week to see a new work by the sculptor Peter Lenk, [a] carved relief of naked German political leaders [former German Finance Minister Hans Eichel, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, current Chancellor Angela Merkel, former governor of Bavaria Edmund Stoiber and current leader of the Free Democrats, Guido Westerwelle] … naked and laughing and grabbing each other’s genitals. A banner over their heads reads, in English, “Global Players.””